Thursday, September 25, 2008

I know, I know, I promised I wouldn't talk about this, but David Blaine promised he would fall to his death and look what happened with that.

Can someone explain to me what Patrick O'Sullivan is doing? I admit that I'm kind of dumb (I listen to Andrew WK), but I don't really see where he has any sort of leverage in this contract holdout, stayaway, whatever you want to call it. To me, there are three ways a restricted free agent can affect his negotiations: arbitration, offer sheet, and missing time. O'Sullivan isn't eligible for arbitration, no one bit on an offer sheet, and the Kings are already missing the playoffs this season so it doesn't matter if he's there or not. There's no incentive for the Kings to give in at all.

Where does that leave O'Sullivan? Lombardi won't give a one-year deal because he doesn't care about this year. The LA Times is reporting Lombardi won't give into anything shorter than a three-year deal, by which time guys like Oscar Moller and Ted Purcell or firmly entrenched on the NHL roster and can replace O'Sullivan if necessary. I think O'Sullivan's agent was hoping to force the Kings into a Jeff Carter-type deal, but the reality is he won't get anything more than a Andrei Kotsitsyn deal. He can either take it or hold out all year. That's basically it.

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Colten Teubert was returned to his Junior team yesterday, a move that was expected by some... okay, me. I expected it. Teubert's game is reliant upon strength and there was just no way he could hang with grown men at this point in time. He'll head to Junior and hopefully improve his defensive positioning and offensive game. I'd say we have 2 years until we see Teubert in the NHL.

16 comments:

Yeah, there's an interesting take at Tom Benjamin's where Tom (who has read way more of the CBA than I have) says that while there are hard penalties for teams over the cap on day one of the (North American) season, there isn't any mechanism apparently to deal with the salary cap floor.

In other words, the Kings apparently don't have to be at the cap floor for the start of the year, and it's even unclear what would happen if L.A. underspent the cap floor for the season.

Take from it what you will; will Lombardi be the first GM to put the vagueness of cap floor to the test?

At the Kings/Coyotes game on Monday, I talked to somebody from the Kings with some inside information about the team. He said that in about a week, the Kings should have O'Sullivan under contract and trade for a veteran defenseman. Let's hope both of those happen.

Fortunately, Bailey didn't bother to show up at the game Monday. And look, they won!! Then again, they might've won because Crawford didn't bother to show up either. LaBarbera was there, and the Coyotes showed him up. And I can't believe I showed up at all.

No, there were a couple guys in suits with Kings' IDs around their neck that I noticed in Section 102. I don't remember the names on their tags.. but I'm certain they were official.

Technically Patty O isn't holding out or any other version of the term. He and DL just haven't reached a contract agreement so Lombardi just told him not to show up to pregame stints like practice and games.

So it's more of an avoiding a dependance on Patty when he isn't on the team for sure.

I kind of feel bad for O'Sullivan; when he is signed, he is going to come back to the team and they will have already spent a lot of time together. They will have their inside jokes and memories and Patty O will just force a confused laugh to look like he knows what they are talking about.

It's not avoiding a dependance on O Sullivan. It's avoiding putting him at risk of an injury. In any sport, whenever you have a player under contract, except in the absolute rarest of circumstances, they are not allowed to practice or anything like that, and both sides want it that way.

The player doesn't want to be out there working hard, and end up having a freak injury, and all of a sudden having to go the GM and say "hey look, I broke my leg in 12 places, but I still want my phat contract with a no trade clause."

The team doesn't want the guy to be out there for insurance reasons, as well as the fact that if he gets hurt, hes useless to them, both in terms of a player for their team, and as trade bait to another team if they're unable to reach a deal.